After winning the 1961 All-Union Contest in Moscow, he played and recorded during the period 1961 to 2001 - more than two thousand concerts in over 330 cities, including Alsfeld, Berlin, Busch, Cologne, Eggenberg, Eisenach, Jena, Kiev, Meppen, Montabaur, Moscow, Munich, Overath, Prague, Remagen, Szeged, Tokyo and Weimar. There's an extensive collection of these recordings at the Rudolf Kehrer Archive in Overath.

Kehrer, whose most recent home was in Zürich, died on 29 October 2013, aged ninety.